some buddies and I were sitting around thinking of a project to work on. we thought it would be insanely cool to beat the crap out of eachother in a Mortal Kombat style game. Of course we want to use ourselves as the characters =) We thought it would be cool to set it up in a way to allow other people to easily put their own images in for a character to allow people all over the world to beat on their friends in a game =) Has anyone experimented with any kind of digitizing without spending loads of money? Of course we don''t expect MK quality graphics. I don''t know of what to try besides getting a nice digital camera and shooting stills against a solid color backdrop and trying to animate them. Any wonderful insight would be appreciated! Mark Mengelt Program Analyst Phoenix, AZ

You can get a scanner for around $70, maybe cheaper. Though if you''re going to be taking alot of pictures to scan, the money you spend on scanner and film might be better spent on a digital camera in the first place.

Another idea is getting a web-cam thingy (also cheap) and hitting "print screen" to copy to the clipboard, pasting into a paint program to touch up. If you have a camcorder already, just a cheap video card should do.

aig

i was thinking of importing the digital camera shots directly into photoshop or some other graphics program to remove all the background color and leave just the frame of animation. i thought this might look better than taking a picture with a regular camera and scanning the photo but maybe i''m wrong =) thanks for the feedback


Mark Mengelt
Program Analyst
Phoenix, AZ

That is what I was going to suggest, about using a digital camera. It would be difficult to expect a lot of people to have digital cameras to be able to import there own images. They would also have to film against either a blue or green background, and remove the green. No user is going to do that. Only game developers would do it.

I''ve thought about using digitized images, and I think it would be a great idea. Make sure you storyboard all the moves you are going to film so you don''t waste time. If you decide to do it, I want to see it.

My team has used scanned drawings images for a project before. Fixing up and preparing the frames, will be a full time job.

Domini

why is it that blue and green backgrounds are used instead of black? is it because its easier to remove green and blue from the frames?

i agree Domini that no one would really go through the effort to do this, but we thought if we could supply a tool to minimize the effort people might try..

we would of course provide the user with the number of frames each paticular animation would have, add a feature to elimate a green/blue background color, provide the camera shooting distance from the person, provide the height the camera stand, etc..


Mark Mengelt
Program Analyst
Phoenix, AZ

Well, I was anchor for a little station back home during high school, so I''ll tell you a little about how "bluescreening" works...

The reason you use odd colors like bright green and bright blue is the fact that these colors don''t really occur in humans. The equipment filters out all of a certain color, so you can''t use something like white (unless you want to lose the head and hands of the person you''re trying to bluescreen, which is a cool effect if you wanted it...) Black isn''t used because eyelashes, hair, etc are black. The more contrast you can get, the better job of removing the background you can do.

-fel

HAHA! Me and my friends already did exactly what you are talking about! Man, its hilarious... Anyways, we used a digital camera and a big green blanket as background. That was pretty much our studio, and it worked fairly well. The game plays pretty much like mortal kombat, with high/low punch/kick, uppercuts that send the guy flying, etc. Our props included a stick with pointy things on it, a golf club, Tigger, Mountain Dew, and my friend Ryan''s older sister (hot), among other things. Just thought you might be interested in how we did it. Hm... that reminds me, I need to finish putting in the rest of the characters in that game... then i can release it =)

-Chao Yun
http://www.oz.net/~steelsrc

One big tip I have to give you is HAVE A PLAN. You''re gonna want to know exactly how each guy should stand, every frame you''re gonna need, where the camera should be positioned, all ahead of time. Otherwise it will just be a big mess and you''ll end up with garbage. This happened on some of our first shots, and we just ended up doing them over again because they sucked. Sometimes, the camera was from a slightly different angles on different frames, and that made it look totally stupid. So remember to keep the camera in one spot. Have the person being photographed stay in the same general spot as well. Another thing that went wrong was sometimes we would miss a certain frame that we needed on a guy. For example, we missed one of the blocking frames on a character. We had to go back and do it over, and by then the person had already moved away and lost concentration on what he was doing, etc. and it looked different from the rest of his frames. You should keep a checklist for every frame you need of a person so this doesn''t happen. Well hope that helps,

-Chao Yun
http://www.oz.net/~steelsrc

Hi all.

Once upon a time I was planning on doing just what this folk is sugesting. But I was thinking in asking the users to send me their raw video/pictures and after discarding bad material, then do the rest of the work myself. I agree with the person who said end users won''t bother doing all that labor intensive thing.

Topgoro